Ithaca College

Tom Kerr, Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, has published Steve Champion’s Dead to Deliverance: A Death Row Memoir, edited with foreword by Professor Kerr.

In the memoir published by Split Oak Press, Champion describes his early life in Los Angeles and the allure for him of the Crips street gang, his incarceration and experience in the U.S. prison system, his life on death row, and his growth and struggle as a human being. He also offers a critical analysis of the prison system, especially capital punishment, and describes how through sustained collaboration with Stanley Tookie Williams and Anthony Ross he evolved on death row from a high school dropout into an accomplished writer and student of the humanities.

Actor, activist, and writer Mike Farrell, President of Death Penalty Focus and the author of Just Call Me Mike: A Journey to Actor and Activist, and Of Mule and Man, offers the following endorsement:

“America’s death penalty is dying of exhaustion.  People have grown tired of pretending killing can be done fairly.  They’re embarrassed at the racial bias, chagrined at the shameful list of mistakes made, sickened that only the poor are put down like dogs.  They doubt that only the ‘worst of the worst’ are on death row, people ‘not like the rest of us,’ only monsters beyond redemption.  And they’re right. Steve Champion’s life, as told in Dead to Deliverance, proves they are right.  And in so doing it will help destroy the barbaric institution of state killing.”